Archives For Drivers of change

Faye Chua, head of futures research at ACCA, talks about the latest research on the future drivers of change for the accountancy and business community.

Accountants need to embrace an enlarged strategic and commercial role

As businesses evolve their strategies, structures and business models to survive and thrive in a turbulent environment, there is a clear opening for accountants to assume a far greater organisational remit. The need to ensure responsible practices in the pursuit of growth opens the door for accountants to participate in broader business decision making. This broader role will require accountants to apply financial expertise in combination with analytical, creative and risk-management skills. These capabilities will prove equally valuable in everything from assessing country risk to developing and testing innovative new revenue models.

Businesses need to pursue technology leadership

The pace of ICT advancement, the sheer potential of what it can deliver and the pervasiveness of adoption now place technology at the heart of strategy and operations of businesses of almost any size. New mindsets and approaches to technology management are required for this rapidly evolving environment where the firm owns less of the computing and communications assets it relies on. The key drivers here are a shift to staff using their own devices, applications and databases being run remotely through cloud computing and the internet becoming the backbone of most enterprises. Each new generation of systems offers increasing intelligence, enhanced flexibility and ever-greater potential to transform working practices. Technology advances are enabling new business models, disrupting value chains and transforming entire industries.

In this interview Marie McCrea, Partner at CIL in South Africa, talks about the Drivers of Change research and the imperatives that the accountancy profession and the business community need to focus on to stay successful. Marie is a member of ACCA’s Accountancy Futures Academy.

Theaccountancy profession needs to reinvent the talent pool.

There are a range of driving forces that suggests a diverse and growing set of demands and impacts on the accountant’s role in the future. This has a direct bearing on recruitment, professional training and development. The speed of change and the rate of emergence of new requirements place an emphasis on the need for ‘on demand’ accelerated learning-based solutions. Increasingly these will be delivered via the internet and mobile devices. At the same time, an increasingly broad, complex and demanding remit will influence the type of people that the profession seeks to attract. Alongside the traditional characteristics typically associated with the profession, traits such as entrepreneurship, curiosity, creativity and strategic thinking skills will become of increasing importance for tomorrow’s accountant.

Western populations, in particular, are ageing rapidly and financial pressures could mean that people have to work on into their late-60s, 70s or 80s. Hence the challenges of managing and addressing the needs and expectations of a multicultural, global and age-diverse workforce will become ever more complex. Technology and the internet now sit at the core of the modern enterprise and may offer some solutions for workforce integration.

Access to talent at all levels is consistently identified as a critical future success factor for small, medium and large enterprises alike. The challenge of securing a suitable flow of talent is increasingly becoming a top priority for CEOs, who are finding growth and development ambitions hampered by talent shortages.

Businesses must assume and plan for volatility

Expectations of economic uncertainty and turbulence now stretch out for a decade or more – driven by serious concerns over the scale of debt at the sovereign, corporate and individual level. At the same time, rapid shifts of wealth and power are taking place across the globe while concerns remain over the robustness of the global economic infrastructure. Under such conditions, a single business plan and a set of governing assumptions are no longer sufficient.

Leaders have to ensure that their organisations can survive and thrive under a range of scenarios. Leaders must also develop a core competency for thinking the unthinkable and preparing for it. Planning assumptions must consider the potential for economic collapse, nationalisation of assets by governments and disruptive innovations that could transform markets, industries or entire economic systems.

An emerging development priority for leaders is the need to learn how to make use of concepts such as chaos theory and integrated systems thinking to manage complexity within the firm.

Ecosystem thinking, risk management, tackling complexity and resilience planning will all need to become part of the core training and development programmes for managers, leaders and accountants.

In this interview Rohit Talwar, CEO Fast Futures, talks about the Drivers of Change research and the imperatives that the accountancy profession and the business community need to focus on to stay successful. Rohit is a member of ACCA’s Accountancy Futures Academy and was involved in the development of the Drivers of Change research.

The accountancy profession needs to develop a global orientation

The pursuit of global opportunities is now a clear priority for large, medium and small enterprises from developed and developing markets alike. The implications for the accountancy function are immense. The first priority is gaining rapid mastery of relatively straightforward matters such as understanding local accounting rules, taxation laws and procedures for profit repatriation, all of which may influence market entry decisions. Then come the more complex challenges of getting a thorough understanding of local business customs and practices, cultural norms and language differences. Key here is developing the mindset within accountancy that is respectful of different practices and cultures and open to ideas, wherever they originate.

The wider businesses community must assume and plan for volatility

Thinking about the future is no longer a luxury or a short discussion in the annual management retreat. Systematic and organisation-wide approaches are now required to scan, explore and assess the implications of key future factors across the short, medium and longer term. Clear responsibilities need to be allocated for identifying and acting on future insights. Companies must be capable of wide-range ‘horizon scanning’ to capture diverse future factors such as driving forces, persistent factors and emerging trends. Consideration must also be given to weak signals, wild cards and the ideas, developments and individuals that could shape the global economy and the operating environment within the industry. Scanning and preparing for a wide range of possibilities, tolerance of uncertainty, curiosity and ‘seeing round corners’ are becoming critical development priorities for managers and leaders alike.